There's so little time, and so much to catch up on, that John Kroger resents the two-hour daily commute to Salem in the 2002 Honda.

There's the Sam Adams investigation and the Oppenheimer Funds lawsuit. The campaign to fund an environmental crimes unit and the push to accelerate the cleanup at Hanford. The consumer protection battles and the scam alerts.

After four months of active duty in the attorney general's office, Kroger has finally outmaneuvered the financial-services lobby and secured the ability to prosecute debt collectors who break the law.

He has appealed the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's conditional approval of the siting of a liquefied natural gas terminal in Clatsop County and weighed in against House Bill 3058, a fast-track LNG siting bill that he argues will have a "profound impact on property rights" -- and seizure -- in Oregon.

But Kroger is the first to admit, "It's too early to say whether I'm going to be a successful attorney general or not. I don't think I have delivered anything or accomplished anything very meaningful yet."

That's certainly the case on public records. Given the need for resolution in the Adams' investigation, and restitution in the stunning losses suffered by the Oregon College Savings Plan, I don't have much of a quarrel with the AG's priorities.

But when Kroger is ready to deal with the transparency of Oregon's public records later this summer, I do know whose lead he should follow: Mark McCambridge, the vice president for finance and administration at Oregon State University.

McCambridge has instituted a system at OSU that is the perfect antidote to the bizarre, paranoid and problematic culture of secrecy at the University of Oregon. He summed up his approach to public records in a recent interview with the Web site Inside Higher Ed:

"It's pretty basic, but it is very transparent," McCambridge said. "Everybody in the institution can see everything that goes on everywhere."

McCambridge told me Monday that sums up both his personal philosophy and the institutional philosophy at OSU: "We want everyone to see what's going on. Five or six years ago we put everything on the Web. When you operate a complex little city like a research institution, the more you have out there the better."

UO has reached different conclusions, of course, as state agencies are free to do. That problem may only get worse, notes Mary Beth Herkert, the state archivist, thanks to the identity theft bill passed by the 2007 Legislature.

The bill requires state agencies to classify all information on a scale of 1-to-4, with "1" being information readily available on the agency Web site and "4" being information that, if released, might lead to a loss of life or an increased terrorist threat.

Unfortunately, Herkert said, there are no specific guidelines for agencies to follow in gauging public access: "If you allow individuals to classify records, the natural tendency is to classify them higher than they need to be. You'll have one agency applying it one way, and another a different way. What we end up with is an inconsistent application of public-record law."

More of the same, in other words.

Kroger said, "There's a clear feeling among many that we have less transparency than we used to have in state government." He intends to set Associate AG David Leith and spokesman Tony Green, late of The Oregonian, to the task of determining whether that odious trend is legitimate or justified.

The answer, McCambridge knows, is neither. Open the books, he said, and questions are answered, rumors spiked, mistakes corrected, and confidence restored.